Where is God During the Pandemic?

— An Invitation to a Mysticism of Wide-Open Eyes

This morning, I woke up to an email from a dear friend asking me to reply to the question: “Where is God during the pandemic?” He was asking in the wake of reading James Martin’s NY Times Article, and was open-mindedly curious about the question, while admittedly looking for a bit of reassurance. It is not to Martin’s article, but to his question, that I have offered the following response:

God — the question? the mystery? the presence? the person? the concept? — has a tendency to disappear during times like ours — drowned out by the sounds of the cries of the suffering ones in our world. The question “Where is God?” during a time of pandemic is not only a fair one, but an acutely existential one, and is often in some way an attempt to legitimize one’s own experience of living through a period of individual or collective trauma. And it is also, no doubt, the consequence of having snuck a peek at that shadowy horizon of death.

The question has, however, been asked before. It echoes Jesus’ hanging words on the cross:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

…which is just another, more accusatory form of the “Where are you, God?” question. And it has also been heard in the bewildering reflections of Elie Wiesel’s experience of witnessing a young boy dangle from the gallows at Auschwitz:

“Behind me, I heard the same man asking, ‘For God’s sake, where is God?’”

And from within me, I heard a voice answer: ‘Where is He? This is where — hanging here from this gallows…”

The question of “Where is God?”, when posed in contexts of suffering such as these — by their inherently tragic settings can yield neither a direct nor a reassuring reply; and thus I can’t help but wonder if, rather, the question is itself meant to flail in the air as a statement of finality around our own finite ability to answer it?

I wonder if the question is a sort of obsidian mystical boundary, if you will, meant to mirror the abyss revealed by the faceless victims — or “Severinos” or, “nameless ones,” as João Cabral has begged in his poem, The Death and Life of Severino — who have died unjust deaths?

I wonder if this question is itself meant to sway in the whisperless wind, taunting our best attempts at some ground of reassurance?

And yet, perhaps this question-without-response is itself also yet another kind of hidden answer awaiting excavation — an answer that has no reply, but calls to us in another voice that echoes Wiesel’s finger pointing to the gallows — just, there. The unjust-death-event, especially as perceived by those who are left behind, has a felt temporal finality to it — and just like the question it provokes, the unjust-death-event is its own ghastly proposition etched eternally into our communal deep memory. This question is also a question in which it seems to me that God (if God be anything like life, like Love) is right to contingently vanish from not only one’s vocabulary, but also one’s own existential experience in its wake — for when life itself is extinguished, so too has God rightly perished with it.

But, “What then, has become of Love?”

Perhaps a more mystical rendering of the death-event might beg an even deeper consideration of the question: “Where is God during this time of pandemic?” Contemplative author and teacher James Finley has developed a larger mystical theology of suffering from which there are a couple important elements I want to highlight for consideration here:

1. Mysticism is such that we begin the journey as the question-askers, looking for answers or solutions — but we end up realizing along the way, that not only are we not the ones asking the questions — but it is God who is asking the question, and we don’t even know what the question is (a la Merton)! This is another way to affirm that there is a cloud of unknowing that enshrouds our human quest for God.
2. The moment that we awaken to realize (on the journey of relieving both one’s own and one another’s suffering, which is a moral imperative) that we cannot relieve the suffering of ourselves or of another, God enters as the infinity of that realization. Finley uses the term ‘Christ’ to name that place that is the infinite presence of God in the most interior places that hurt where we are powerless to relieve it ourselves. While it doesn’t necessarily relieve the suffering, it is too, there.

It seems to me that if we had only these two mystical insights (although there are a surplus to consider here), we would already be carried to a new horizon in the question: “Where is God in these times of pandemic?”. What if, in a mystical reversal of the question, it is God who is asking the question of us, “Where is God?” (talk about an oscillating feedback loop!) — and, it’s just that the haunt of the silence is that God does not seemingly answer God’s own question? This reversal opens up a couple of significant elements for us to consider as well:

1. The God who has vanished reappears in the form of an unanswerable question, indeed maybe as the ‘silent cry’ of German liberation theologian Dorothee Soelle’s naming, in the hearts of those who live into what she called a “mysticism of wide-open eyes” (a mystical perspective having awakened to death and suffering).
2. In the felt disappearance of God as both existential experience of loving or life-giving relation and any conciliatory response to the tormenting question of “Where is God?”, perhaps it is in that absence that we meet the suffering Christ who becomes the trace of a Divine Manifold, or what theologian Roland Faber has called an “in/difference” at the very heart of the world. Here, God is not only, as philosopher A.N. Whitehead called God — “the fellow sufferer who understands,” but also the reverberating “silent cry” itself — the presence of Christ united in the experience of suffering within us — as the response at the very center of the unanswerable question where Love may only show up as grief itself — as absence itself.

In essence, this mystical presence is an in/difference within us in which, as author Paula D’Arcy has said, “God comes to you disguised as your own life,” and especially — as I would like to add in the context of this conversation — “as your own (suffering) life.” This disappearance is also a mystical appearance of another kind, indeed a sort of dis/appearance in which the veil is pulled back and Love (or God?, for God is Love) is stripped bare and unveiled as the suffering heartbeat of the living and dying world itself.

Soelle, in concert with Cabral’s poem, has offered us a helpful framing to contour this paradox here:

“One may speak of a longing for death, perhaps even a mysticism of death, so much are all the encounters of this journey related to death…Mysticism wants nothing else but to love life, even where analysis has run its course and all that is left is to count the victims. To love life also where it has long been condemned to death, even from its very beginning, is an old human ability to go beyond what is. The ability is called transcendence or faith or hope — or listening to the silent cry.”

This mystical posture of wide-open eyes (the very one I am holding out to us as an invitation to consider during these times) that listens to the silent cry in some register from beyond (beneath? within?) is named as faith or hope, and is, in its very encounter with death, also a mysticism of death that overflows as a mysticism of life, love, faith, hope, and the affirmation of the becoming world. It is a ‘yes’ within death’s apparent ‘no.’ It is an experience in which God has disappeared not only into the asking of the question “Where is God?” itself, but it is simultaneously the transfiguration of the question into a quality of the “silent cry” — as a loving and affirming world-fidelity that is present in the whimper of its own vulnerability and manifold weakness.

In its desire to “love life” — which includes death-experience — it must not speak to this question other than in the voice and tone of grief and the felt experience of absence. It must venture through any attempt at giving an answer to the question at hand and into a novelty not only of darkness, but of a hush that chills to the core. Remember, the cry is silent — as it is silence itself. And this is the very voice and ab/sense of God in the midst of suffering: a foreboding silence. And yet, still it comes as as a presence of silence.

And oh how a silence like this can sometimes speak quite loudly, can it not?

It is here that I believe we cross a threshold into a mystical silence in which there is not only no proper answer to the question, “Where is God in times of pandemic?”, but there is really only an unanswerable and ever-present silence in which, as Wiesel has said so disturbingly, it is revealed that this question is where God also actually is: “hanging in the gallows.” In this sense, God is unveiled as both the one suffering (the suffering One?), and indeed the Severino, the nameless and dead one.

God has died. Oh, there God is!

This is the felt sense in both Jesus’ and Wiesel’s cries in which God is nowhere to be found — which is always to say that God is both no/where and now/here.

Where else would God be, but hanging from the gallows?

And, where else would Love be, but in the failing lungs of those afflicted with this death-dealing COVID-19 virus?

To open oneself to a mysticism of wide-open eyes then, is a dis/appearing act in which there is a recognition that the infinity of these days of death — and the seemingly infinite days of death ahead of us—can become for us times that, like a saturated paper towel that gives way to a tear in the center, become soaked through with the potential for the perceived boundaries or separations between us and God to give way as well.

These are thin days. To be sure God is dying, and Love is near.

It could be that, in the translucency of these times, Love may come to us as some queer and surprising lamp-in-the-darkness that does not arrive as some savior to relieve us of our suffering, for it will not. Nor will it definitively answer for us the question of, “Where is God?,” for it must not. But softly and gently, it may glow from within — as immanently and immediately intertwined with us — iridescent as the question itself posed by a silent crier— right there in those places of hurt that are about a half-centimeter wide and a million miles deep. We would not ask the question at all were it not for Love.

This magnetic pulsation — this suffering at the heart of our world that draws us deeper than any answerable question — is what we encounter when we follow the lures deeper down, for as author Annie Dillard has so brilliantly illustrated:

“If you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inextricable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.”

This unified field masquerades under the mystical name for a mutual immanence that is God-as-the-silent-cry-whose-heart-is-Love-expressed-as-grief-in-you. This mysterious and perplexing experience comes to us only as given when we give ourselves to it — when we are available enough to mutually sink into one another in our “inextricable caring for one another,” which is the deep center of the suffering-Christ in us all. We have to travel over the world’s rim to find it, and it seems that even now this disease is standing right behind us cackling like a bully who is ready to push us over the edge. It is more likely, however, that we have already been pushed and are free-falling into the chasm, whether we are conscious of it or not.

This invitation to a mysticism of wide-open eyes means that we will be unable to look away from the death all around us any longer. We are already staring it dead in the face, yes? This is a time where heading into a mystical death will invoke a lived practice of a ‘mysticism of death.’ If this ‘mysticism of death’ held out before us by Soelle is also a “mysticism that wants nothing but to love life, even where analysis has run its course and all that is left is to count the victims,” then we must learn to “love life where it has long been condemned to death” — which means, directly in the midst of a crisis like this. It is undoubtedly where we will find God hanging out during this pandemic — with those being tormented by this horrific disease. And if God is there, then Love is there, too.

But, “How are we to do such a thing!?”, we might ask.

Surrender and find solidarity, Love replies. We can only really let go, anyways.

But, “Surely the suffering is too great! Surely this pandemic of death is too widespread for Love’s horizon to encircle it!”, we may think aloud.

There is a unified field, Love replies. Ride those monsters down. Let’s swim in the ocean a while and see what turns up.

Pedro Casaldáliga, a bishop and poet of Northeast Brazil, once said that,

“First of all, death bowls me over. Death is always death despite all mysticism.

(we could pause right there for a thousand years, but alas, we must take a deep breath and keep going)

Sometimes I nearly despair and I ask God the reason for all those senseless deaths, those deaths that hunger causes, or the long, long ways people have to walk, the unavailable medical care or the injustice…’Killed dead ones’ as we say here, absurd, insane deaths. But on the other hand, I believe in God and I believe in hope. For me hope has become a very sharp knife that becomes even sharper the more deeply it cuts into the flesh of the ever present death…”

(and onward…)

When you dance with death, you must dance well. There is no other way…in liberation theology, death becomes an element of freedom. Death is not excluded from love, and death excludes no one from love.”

Death bowls us over. Full stop. Whoof. Even the most enlightened of mystics cannot escape its snare. And yet hope also has a way of dragging us around as well, doesn’t it? And resilience too has its way with us from time-to-time, doesn’t it? And so do Love, and Beauty, and, and, and…

And so, with wide-open eyes, mustn’t we dance during this time with both Love and Death, recognizing that we can never really pull them apart, for “death is not excluded from love, and death excludes no one from love?”

In some sense, it seems that our asking of the location-based question of “Where is God during the pandemic?” is now transformed into a question being asked of us in the form of an invitation to embody a new way of life as we stumble our way into living the ensuing response to a question akin to: “Where is Love in death?”

Right there, Love replies, each and every time. Will you dance with me?

Perhaps another way into this inverted question would be to say something like God, too, has wide-open eyes, and thus the journey for us is one of bringing into focus what seems to be something we can only spy through a glass dimly. It is an ever-consolidating recognition that we might continually awaken to realize that those wide-open eyes are actually the same as our own eyes. God’s gaze of Love is your gaze of Love, and your gaze of Love, is God’s. For, as Soelle has spoken wisely of this mystical death unto union:

“What really happens in mystical union is not a new vision of God but a different relationship to the world — one that has borrowed the eyes of God.”

Here that trickster-God dis/appears once again disguised as a life that, as I often recite with my children at bedtime most nights, is Love. Love is your essence. Forget that, Love is essence. Love is the name that we have given the essence of the fields and fibers that hold us all together. For many, it seems that whether by avoidance, or by busyness, or by privilege, there has been an ability to stave off having to see the perils of the world with a “mysticism of wide-open eyes.” That time is in the West is no longer.

Here and now, the cries of the suffering ones must open our eyes to the very eyes of a Love that compassionately gazes into the eyes of death from within death itself. This is not an answer to the question posed at the outset of this article, but is rather a way of seeing it from the perspective of the one asking the question — the ones whose cries have historically been silenced. It takes a kind of dying to see this, and especially in order to find that Love is there, too.

Maybe we are being invited to become icons of this communion of unceasing resonance — of communion with the suffering Christ — of a communion where we go beyond the question of “Where God is,” only in order to be thrust, to use Casaldáliga’s phrase, into having “become naked” — bound up in what Love might be asking of us as we step, blinking through the path of suffering ahead into some new and birthing dawn? If we are to descend into that place where we might become mystically one in solidarity with the suffering Christ in our own sheer inability to both relieve suffering and answer the very question at hand, perhaps it is God godself who will appear once more as an incarnation disguised as our own (suffering) lives?

Is this world full of an infinite grief? Or is it full of an infinite Love?

In short, yes.

But perhaps grief is an expression of “love under the condition of absence?”, as psychologist and theologian Bruce Rogers-Vaughn has posed. Perhaps Love grieves? Love/grieves and grief/Loves. This is the true presence of absence where Love and grief dissolve into a sort of One-ing.

In this era of pandemic, we are being beckoned to heed the call of our shared life together and its unyielding suffering to be united in our wonder at the complexity and integrity of this newly encountered domain we find ourselves in. We will not be able to turn away from what we see here. We are unified as bodies of the indelible and silent cry that binds us together in a “this-world” fidelity. It is this silent cry that is the cry of a Love that grieves with/in-us. And it is here that we are tangled up not only in God, but also with one another, which is to say one and the same thing.

And so, while I must admit that although I do not know quite what the question is anymore (God may be our best name for the unknown question at the heart of this silent cry), and nor can I give it a direct answer, I can say that I am unraveling — becoming naked, if you will, in its remnant light — and that feels to me to be an adventure of the ever-deepening gravitation toward the “naked breast of reality.” And, it is in this place of intensifying nakedness where our inseparable and in/different unity is beheld in its own inherent sacredness with both its divine and human labels from a new set of mystical eyes.

We must come to see that, there, in that bottomless place beneath knowing, it may just be Love that is asking the questions now. As God wheezes and labors, there, under the weight of this pandemic and without the aid of a ventilator — indeed even as God very well may die for us, and we may lose God — we may find that the curtain parts to reveal a ceaseless and silent tear-soaked dance between death and a tender Loving embrace that truly loses nothing and ever-births God anew for us from the wreckage of this pandemic.

And so, as Soelle even now encourages us:

“May the one who also cries in us help us all to learn to hear the cry in the foundations of the world.”

And in our listening, may we encounter that mysticism of wide-open eyes that transforms our suffering into a vision of solidarity that leads us to hold even the dying ones with a fearless world-fidelity that enfleshes the very heart of God afresh.

You can connect with me on Twitter here: @tdburnette.